Alice Wiemers, Village Work: Development and Rural Statecraft in Twentieth-Century Ghana

In the epilogue to Village Work, author Alice Wiemers emphasizes the reality that “development is a political enterprise” (148). By historicizing the “NGO-ification” of Northern Ghana or the ubiquity of non-governmental organizations across the region today, Wiemers shows us how categories of development are used by a range of people and institutions to meet a multitude of “ideological, political, and practical needs” (27). The book spans almost eight decades, from the colonial to neo-liberal era, and each chapter reveals elements of what Wiemers calls “hinterland statecraft” (13)—a process that not only acknowledges that rural development initiatives were a primary way that people in the North encountered the state, but also centers the ways that residents, through resisting, accepting, leveraging, or becoming agents of development, shaped the terms of these interactions. By analyzing the struggles between long-standing chiefs, colonial administrators, community leaders, development funders, rural citizens, and a revolving cast of government bureaucrats, Village Work forces readers to re-envision Ghana’s Northern Region less as a target of development, and more as a dynamic site where the meanings and outcomes of development projects, plans, and promises were created and contested over time.

While much of Weimers’s research focuses on the Northern settlement of Kpasenkpe, Village Work is not microhistory. As a place where governments and international agencies have focused their efforts, Kpasenkpe’s history grounds the narrative and provides entry into the more intimate aspects of development work. Additionally, Wiemers’s use of sources—including government records, oral interviews, newspapers, NGO publications, and hundreds of petitions sent to administrators across Ghana’s North (1957–1992)—illustrates how seemingly “local” demands were part of broader, more complex regional, national, and international processes. Equally impressive is Wiemers’s reframing of development debates and other assumed categories like “the village,” “participation,” and “partnership” that render invisible histories of extractive labor and inequalities in wealth and power. Wiemers’s engagement with the lives and careers of Kpasenkpe’s chiefly family further challenges a whole array of “development fictions” (10–11) that not only positioned rural villagers as undifferentiated and local populations, but also the North as an administrative backwater with untapped potential.

Although the book is structured chronologically, Wiemers privileges rural residents’ experiences and organization of time. Chapter One starts in the colonial period and lays the foundation for how models of progressive chieftaincy and demands for labor would become central to rural development in the proceeding decades. Throughout the chapter, we learn how systems of labor extraction emerged from colonial forced labor regimes and were repackaged in the postwar era by British officials and progressive chiefs as “in the interest of the community,” and as evidence of local initiative and self-help (31, 44). Chapter Two focuses on struggles over the terms of village development and work during “Nkrumah’s time” or the years following decolonization. As Wiemers rightly points out, Nkrumah’s vision of development as industrial and export-orientated often relegated Northern villages to the margins of the Convention People’s Party (CPP) agenda. However, by the 1960s, we begin to see an important shift in the political economy of development. In the North, these changes were fueled by an emphasis on national unity rather than on shows of local solidarity, as well as by the emergence of powerful new networks that allocated resources along party lines.

Chapters Three and Four shift our attention onto the significance of family networks, local leaders, and rural citizens in shaping state-led development. Through centering the lives of those within Kpasenkpe’s chiefly family, Chapter Three offers an intimate look inside hinterland statecraft. More specifically, Wiemers’s history of the networks built within and beyond the household of long-standing chief Wulugunaba Sebiyam illustrates how family members, as residents and agents of development, managed state-wide initiatives. Such a perspective further exposes important sites of inequity, mainly along the lines of gender, generation, and education. Nowhere was this more visible than in the lives of Sebiyam’s junior family members, or those expected to maintain the farm and compound as his children attended school. Chapter Four analyzes the 1970s, a “surprisingly vibrant period of rural engagement with developers and governments” (28). Known locally as the “time of Agric,” this was an era of renewed emphasis on state agricultural programs that pushed the North from the margins to the center of national planning. Here, readers discover the strategies rural residents undertook to make claims on, and attract, government resources—from plows, tractors, and fertilizer to schools, roads, and hospitals. In the absence of a strong centralized government, readers learn how citizens, including the chief’s family, relied on established models of leadership and self-help, while also forming new relationships with the state, the community, and each other.

Chapter Five and the book’s epilogue span the 1980s to the twenty-first century. Chapter Five shows how rural residents navigated neoliberal development through interactions with structural adjustment policies, and NGOs such as World Vision International. It also delivers on the argument (Chapter Three) about the longevity of local and family networks in mediating village development. As the state dismantled agricultural subsidies, shrunk the civil service, and cut social programs, people in the North continued to rely on strategies and connections that had been constructed over decades. Equally significant is Weimers’s return to the topic of labor. For rural people, development was work and key to how they “experienced, navigated, and made meaning of extractive systems” (147). As we see throughout the book, this work was multifaceted, from distributing state resources, performing community interest, and managing funders expectations to molding blocks, carrying water, and clearing roads. Ultimately, one of Village Work’s most enduring contributions will be its positioning of rural and labor history as fundamental to development studies. Such an approach encourages both scholars and practitioners of development to take seriously long-term interactions with labor and leadership, as well as established strategies of managing scarcity and uncertainty, when analyzing or designing projects meant to improve the lives of rural people and address regional and global inequities.